We’ve already shown you a lot of Plextor and LITE-ON drives which were on display at CES 2018, but there are two more. The LITE-ON D.2 M.2 NVMe SSD which is an open-channel SSD and the read-oriented enterprise NVMe SSD EP2.
LITE-ON D2 M.2 Open Channel SSD
LITE-ON is one of the largest manufactures when it comes to solid-state storage and they’re a leader with their open-channel SSD platform too. The D2 is an M.2 module in a 22110 form factor which can offer up to 2TB capacity.
Performance figures aren’t given for this drive and there is a valid reason for it. It really depends on how the drive is used. This might sound a little weird, but it’s actually logic once you get behind the idea. I could try and explain the technical aspects, but LITE-ON has a video that does a much better job at that. And it does so in term most people can understand: parking lots and cars.
The LITE-ON D2 uses a LightNVM FTL architecture and its key selling point is an extremely low latency.
LITE-ON EP2 M.2 Enterprise-Grade SSD
LITE-ON’s EP2 is a more traditional drive, but also an M.2 NVMe SSD with a 22110 form factor. The EP2 is available with up to 1TB capacity and it is rated for one full drive write per day. As you might have spotted on the image below, the EP2 features power-loss protection. That feature is handled by the capacitors you see in the middle of the drive.
Performance-wise, the EP2 delivers up to 2200 MB/s at sequential read operations and 800MB/s at write operations. An ultra-low latency is also key for this drive where it goes as low as 30μs. The random read and write performance is rated at 270K and 35K IOPS respectively.
Ideal applications for this drive would be online transaction processing, financial transaction, e-commerce, or email and messaging server.
